Top Lawyers at Kraft Heinz, Phillips 66 Earn Big Paychecks (1)

Paula Johnson and Rashida La Lande earned collective $15 million last year

Filings show total compensation for legal chiefs at Boeing, IBM, and Philip Morris

Compensation cuts may be coming to in-house counsel across the U.S. as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, but recent proxy filings show that 2019 was lucrative for some law department leaders.

Two women topped the most recent batch of public company statements detailing their management’s performance last year.

Paula Johnson, executive vice president of legal and government affairs, general counsel, and corporate secretary at Phillips 66, earned more than $7.69 million in total compensation during 2019. Almost $3.1 million of that sum came in the form of stock and option awards.

Johnson also earned $2.24 million in cash, per the proxy filed last week by Phillips 66, a Houston-based energy company that has employed her as its legal chief since 2012. Bloomberg data shows that Johnson owns roughly $4.83 million in Phillips 66 stock.

Rashida La Lande, global general counsel at the Kraft Heinz Co., which hired her in January 2018, earned more than $7.38 million in 2019. The North American food and beverage giant, headquartered in both Chicago and Pittsburgh, gave nearly $5.91 million in stock awards to La Lande last year.

The former corporate partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher earned $1.24 million in cash from Kraft Heinz, where La Lande also serves as a senior vice president, corporate secretary, and head of corporate social responsibility and government affairs. La Lande owns Kraft Heinz stock valued at $3.45 million, according to Bloomberg data.

Below is a list of 40 companies and their respective law department leaders sorted by their total compensation, a figure that often includes large grants of stock that vest over a period of years. To account for that lag, the total cash earned by each lawyer—a number that includes annual salary, cash bonuses, and non-equity incentive plan compensation—is listed parenthetically.